The Sweet Smell of Grass in The Summertime

You gotta love Canada! Come summer and the deliriously sweet smell of marijuana presses upon you as you amble through the parks of Toronto or the streets of Montreal. An old, familiar smell, like that of a childhood blanket or the fragrance of my mothers’ saris, warm and comforting like a lingering happy memory.

Every April, smokers gather in the city-centre to light up in stoned unison at the 420 event. Once a year, cannabis connoisseurs march down Yonge Street demanding weed-friendly laws and regulations, crying out No prison for pot, or truisms such as We smoke pot, we smoke it a lot. Your weed habits could set you up for some useful contribution to clinical research trials, or you could hold informational, educational sessions titled Ten things about life smoking weed has taught me, or Marijuana 101 for Dummies.

The first time I was stoned was when I was in college, not on campus grounds but at a rich kid’s farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in Bangalore, on New Year’s Eve, with a large group of people of which only a handful were close friends from college and all others were friends’ friends, basically strangers I no longer remember. It was a pretty uneventful experience; I only remember feeling giddy and light-headed, constantly wondering if I was missing out on something life-alteringly important because up until then I did not know what it was like to be high.

My most memorable trip took place a few years later on the balcony of the office building in Bangalore I was employed in at the time, no one at work in the twilight hours of that Sunday. S and V, two of my closest friends to this day, and I rolled a joint under the expert instructions of V, my long-haired Bullet-riding road-tripping poetry-spouting tattoo-flashing chain-smoking hippie friend, who is a very different man today than he was all those years ago. He taught us to drag on the joint and hold the smoke within until the joint had made its way around the circle and come back to us, which is when we were to blow out and take another drag pronto.

I did two unforgettable things that evening. I called up a friend of S, a friend I had only heard of and spoken with on the phone occasionally but had never met, and regaled him with an impromptu a cappella rendition of The Cranberries’ Animal Instinct, a performance he sat through patiently without interruption. The other thing I did was to hang out with another colleague I had promised to meet up with that evening, and I spent our time together walking up and down Brigade Road, frequently bursting into peals of laughter, unable to explain to him why. Suffice to say he always approached me with a great deal of caution ever since.

I was happy that day. And content. And I came dangerously close to thinking I had seen everything there was to see in life, I had attained bliss, contentment, nirvana, and that there was nothing more to live for and explore. It was a fleeting thought, one that has come back to haunt me often at other times.

Speaking of happiness, looks like weed lube is the latest talk of the town. Fifteen minutes of weed-assisted orgasmic pleasure. Clearly I haven’t experienced everything life has to offer. I remain content though.